23rd January 2004 Archive

Hollywood has abandoned its attempt to stifle publication of DVD decryption code, by dropping its lawsuit against a Californian publisher. The DVD CCA (Copy Control Association) filed a trade secrets lawsuit against Andrew Bunner (and others) for disclosing details of the DeCSS, which circumvents the CSS encryption scheme used on DVD discs.

For the first time in Internet history there are more DNS rootservers outside the United States than within, following this week's launch in Frankfurt of an anycast "instance" of RIPE NCC-managed K root server.

The two big computing ideas of the twenty first century grid computing and web services were brought closer together by an announcement this week at GlobusWorld the grid conference run by Globus Alliance, writes Bloor Research analyst Peter Abrahams.

I recently visited an outsourcing company in the Boston area that provides a back-up and disaster recovery service, writes Bloor Research analyst Robin Bloor. The company was Live Vault, although you're unlikely to hear the name directly as they sell through the channel. There were two interesting points that the company had to offer, beyond the fact that it offers a quick to install service.

IBM’s big push at Linux World is to announce new programs to help customers dump Window NT and move straight to Linux. IBM’s logic is that by the end of 2004, Microsoft will discontinue support for the Windows NT operating system and discontinue the availability of security patches, which will require up to two million customers to develop a migration strategy.

Microsoft's recently released Blaster clean-up tool was downloaded 1.4 million times during the first few hours of its availability earlier this month. The strong need for the tool makes a case for greater automation of viral removal, according to Microsoft.

Bill Gates will be making one of his bigger sales calls on Monday morning. He's over in the UK for Chancellor Gordon Brown's entrepreneurs' summit, and will also be speaking at a Microsoft Longhorn developer conference later in the day. But squeezed in between we'll have a meeting with Gordon Brown himself, Peter Gershon of the Office of Government Commerce, and National Health Service IT head Richard Grainger.